Susan Campbell: Stealing Campaign Signs Hits At Free Speech

Campaigns signs along Route 4 in Farmington just before the November 2017 election. (Jordan Otero Sisson/Hartford Courant)

Women like Christine Palm are running for political office as never before. Across the country, 198 women are seeking seats in the U.S. House, 19 in the U.S. Senate, and 13 are running for governor. Women are pushing back on politics as usual — in campaign financing, in child care, in ways that might clean out the fusty corners of the halls of power.

And they’re asking questions that haven’t been asked — in large part because no one has thought to ask them.

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Here’s one: Why is it considered acceptable for people to steal campaign lawn signs? Someone’s been swiping Palm’s (“Who leads matters”), and while she doesn’t take it personally, she says she’d “throttle” her own campaign volunteers if they did so. These aren’t just goofy hijinks, the election season equivalent of stealing baby Jesus out of the manger. This is quelling political speech, and it’s a waste of taxpayer money.

“Aside from the cost — which in most cases is paid for with public clean elections funds — it is an abridgment of people’s First Amendment rights,” said Palm. “Political signs reflect people’s core values. Stealing or trashing them stifles this expression. None of us has the right to silence our neighbors, whether we agree with them or not.”

Palm isn’t new to politics. Her sister, Kathleen, was a longtime treasurer for the city of Hartford, and people used to steal her signs, too. For years, Palm was a spokeswoman for the Permanent Commission on the Status of Women, and then, when legislators eliminated what turned out to be a not-so-permanent commission, Palm continued as policy analyst for the new Commission for Women, Children and Seniors. Perhaps it was inevitable she would want to sit on the other side of the microphone from which she so often testified in front of legislative committees.

When she retired, she started a run for public office — the 36th House District in the lower Connecticut River Valley, against an incumbent freshman, Republican Robert Siegrist. Siegrist won in 2016 on a promise to end the other party’s “tax and spend death spiral.”

These are midterms, normally of interest only to the most intense political junkie, but these midterms — Robert Mueller III, Brett Kavanaugh and more — feel as weighted as the last presidential election. So much is at stake, and as low-tech as lawn signs may seem, a 2011 Vanderbilt University study said those signs are often the only contact voters have with their candidates, particularly in smaller, local races. Name recognition is everything, and a well-placed sign on a busy street is every bit as effective as fancy (and expensive) television ads.

Stealing lawn signs is also illegal. Some states have passed laws specifically prohibiting the theft of them, though Connecticut hasn’t, yet. As Joshua Foley at the State Elections Enforcement Commission says, swiping campaign lawn signs is considered generic theft. Don’t do it.

Perhaps because so many candidacies use the signs as their main outreach, Foley said he gets a lot of calls about them, though people seem more concerned about where they’re allowed to place them. To a certain extent, Foley said, placement is up to each town. If signs are placed on public property — say, at an offramp for a highway — Foley generally defers to the state Department of Transportation, whose workers remove signs as fast as they come across them.

Businesses are allowed to display political signs, though most choose not to do so, said Foley, for fear of offending customers who support a different candidate or the other side of a cause. This is not true for all businesses, of course. Last month, The New London Day carried commentary from one gun shop owner, Ron Rando, whose business had a sign out front that said, “A vote for a Democrat is a vote for socialism, fascism and communism.” Rando was responding to earlier commentary in which the writer took issue with his sign. Democrats, socialists, fascists and communists, take note.

Most of the calls to Foley’s office regarding lawn signs have to do with attribution. Signs of a certain size must include information such as who paid for it, and whether the candidate approves. If someone runs afoul of those laws, the commission can fine or issue a cease-and-desist order. As for theft, well, maybe people’s better angels will prevail.

Susan Campbell teaches at the University of New Haven. She is the author of “Dating Jesus: Fundamentalism, Feminism and the American Girl” and “Tempest-Tossed: The Spirit of Isabella Beecher Hooker.” Her email address is slcampbell417@gmail.com.